The great uncertainty of apollo

Even as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the most amazing voyage in history, the suspicion lingers that something doesn\´t feel right. Whenever people talk about Apollo 11 \´s mission to land men on the Moon during July 1969, we hear mock-ironic accusations of faked photos, and TV transmissions beamed from secret studios on Earth. The conspiracy theories reflect unease about Apollo\´s place in history. It refuses to fit into the usual pattern of progress. Just think what normally happens to technology during the course of four decades. In 1886, Karl Benz patented the first automobile. Forty years later, American industry was manufacturing four million of them a year. The Wright Brothers flew the first human-carrying powered aircraft in 1903. Forty years later, air travel was routine. In the 1950s, a handful of institutions had computers. Forty years later, they saturated modern life. And so on. The \´spin-off arguments for lunar exploration have been well rehearsed. Yes, the Apollo adventure did indeed nourish countless areas of the American economy that funded it: speeding up developments in software, integrated circuitry and precision welding, while promoting more subtle skills such as personnel management and risk analysis. These benefits are appreciated by historians, but haven\´t made much of an impact on the public. The more obvious goodies that we might have expected from Apollo seem to be missing. We don\´t all have rockets in our garages and we can\´t all travel to the Moon. The British songwriter Billy Bragg said recently: "When I was a kid in the 1960s, I was excited when they told me, \´Soon, Man will be on the Moon!\´ I didn\´t think they meant just one man." To be fair, a dozen Apollo astronauts explored the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, but Billy has a point. Whatever happened to the Space Age for the rest of us?